The McChrystal Debate, Round 3 Posted by Michael Cohen

Bill Galston has responded to my post on the civil-military implications of General Stanley McChrystal’s recent public announcements on Afghan policy – and I will say that we have some genuine areas of agreement. For example, Bill is absolutely right that entering expanding a war is perhaps the gravest decision a policymaker can make and it merits a robust and open public debate.

And unlike many on the left – and seemingly all Democrats in Congress – Bill and I share the view that General McChrystal should testify on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, have as much right to hear from our commanding general in Afghanistan as the President does.  Indeed, there is a pressing need to debate the dubious conclusions drawn in McChrystal’s review – a process that could have happened if he had been asked to testify before Congress. (One would certainly imagine that would have been better to have that debate before McChrystal’s hand was so clearly shown).

But I suppose our contrasting viewpoints can be summed up as a disagreement about the proper role of the military in advising civilian leaders.

In Galston’s initial blog post he made the comparison between General McChrystal's actions and that of General Shinseki in the run-up to the Iraq war. But Shinseki’s performance was decidedly anodyne when compared to the recent behavior of McChrystal. Like many in the military Shinseki believed that a larger post-occupation force would be needed in Iraq and when asked in a congressional hearing by Senator Carl Levin he dispassionately indicated as such.  In fact, as Tom Ricks recounts in his book “Fiasco” Shinseki went to great lengths to be properly prepared to answer such a question. I am not aware that Shinseki at any point spoke publicly outside the confines of Congress or went on 60 Minutes to plead the case for a larger post-invasion force.

Compare his behavior with that of General McChrystal who has gone from military advisor to advocate.  It’s not simply that McChrystal went to London to publicly call for the full resourcing of a counter-insurgency it’s that he then proceeded in the Q&A to publicly dismiss the strategic approach being debated in the White House and promoted by Vice President Biden. To be blunt, General McChrystal really shouldn't be weighing in publicly on strategic decision-making in this manner. As Bruce Ackerman noted recently in the Washington Post:

Under law, he (McChrystal) doesn't have the right to attend the National Security Council as it decides our strategy. To the contrary, the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 explicitly names the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the National Security Council's principal military adviser.

Galston argues that military leaders should not be “barred from publicly expressing their best judgment as to the strategy and tactics best suited to the problem at hand.”  Well judgment about tactics is one thing; advocacy for a specific strategy is something else altogether.

It’s one thing, for example, to say that a counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan needs to be more fully resourced – that’s akin to what Shinseki testified before Congress – it’s quite another for the General to weigh in on matters of strategy and to do so in such a way that puts him at odds with his civilian overseers. What happens, for example, if Obama goes in a different direction than that advocated by McChrystal? How can he faithfully implement a plan that he has derided in public as unrealistic? Galston’s solution; the general can take the extreme step and resign if he disagrees. But a difference in strategic approach should hardly be routine grounds for resignation – and I just think Galston is underplaying the damage that such actions would have on civil-military relations. Do we really want four-star generals going around resigning because they disagree with the President’s judgment calls on national security strategy? To echo what I said before if this isn’t a recipe of civil-military disaster I don’t know what is.

Not only would such a course put the military increasingly at odds with its civilian superiors, but it would almost certainly further politicize national security decision-making.  I take Bill’s point that his “views on what is constitutionally appropriate are not governed by the short-term interests of either party” but that’s not really the point.

I’ll go back to an argument made by Peter Feaver, who is definitely more of an expert on civil-military relations than I am – and who is, as far as I’m aware not a Democrat:

Whether you favor ramping up or ramping down or ramping laterally, as a process matter, the Commander-in-Chief ought to be able to conduct internal deliberations on sensitive matters without it appearing concurrently on the front pages of the Post. I assume the Obama team is very angry about this, and I think they have every right to be.

As Feaver argues, and as I said at the time, this leak was a clear and unambiguous effort to force Obama’s hand on troop increases.  Instead of weighing the pros and cons of sending more forces to Afghanistan and fighting a counter-insurgency the President (a Democrat who never served in the most respected institution in American society, namely the military) now has to wrestle with the appearance that he is breaking with his own military leadership and the almost guaranteed political fallout from such a move.  This isn’t about short-term partisan interests; its about constricting the choices facing the Commander-in-Chief. 

Bill's argument almost suggest that these choices are made in a political vacuum but as he correctly notes the hyper-partisanship of Washington (and I would argue the inclination of Republicans to so brazenly politicize national security) makes that an impossibility. All the more reason for the military to avoid the appearance of taking sides and instead faithfully adhering to its role as counsel to civilian policy-makers and not advocate. I share Bill’s view that we need to have robust public debates about matters of war and peace, but they should be informed by military counsel, but ultimately debated and decided by the branches of government tasked with that responsibility in the Constitution.

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